Vernacular Political Practices and Everyday Forms of Resistance: Frontier Communities in the Spanish-Portuguese Borderlands During the Seventeenth Century

This chapter analyzes the roles played by local communities along the Spanish-Portuguese borderlands during the so-called Portuguese War of Restoration (1640–1668). It focuses on how these communities sought to defend their means of subsistence within a highly traumatic context. It shows that their efforts to safeguard their way of life shaped their everyday forms of resistance, as well as their exercise of a vernacular politics intended to limit the war’s impact. Their vernacular politics is presented as a strategy linked to these frontier communities’ survival, and as being of equal or greater significance to activities such as contraband trade, or the cross-border pillaging raids these frontier groups took part in. Working from this premise, this study argues that while these diverse modes of behavior might seem contradictory when considered from perspectives other than that of the borderlands, they effectively configured practices of resistance that addressed these frontier communities’ specific interests.